The novel long preceded the short story, and in his celebrated history of the short story Walter Allen calls Walter Scott's "The Two Drovers", written in the early 19th century, the first fully achieved example of the genre. It is a more difficult form to master, as well as being generally less lucrative; journalists who've made a name writing for newspapers seek publishers' contracts to write novels rather than try their hands at short stories.

Paradoxically, perhaps, short stories are better suited to the cinema than novels are, whether they conclude with O Henry-style twists in the tail or Chekhovian epiphanies to be absorbed. John Huston, who took on both The Bible and Moby-Dick in his prime, had his two greatest late successes with film versions of classic stories, James Joyce's The Dead and Rudyard Kipling's The Man Who Would be King, and several of the most distinguished recent films have been based on short fiction, Brokeback Mountain being a major instance.

It is unusual, however, for a movie to be promoted on the strength of a short story (Hemingway's The Killers is a rare exception) or a story to be advertised as "soon to be a major motion picture". It usually takes an anthology to achieve the latter, such as the portmanteau versions of Somerset Maugham so popular in the 1950s, the three Maupassant tales that make up Max Ophüls's Le Plaisir or, to bring me to my point this week, the nine stories and a narrative poem by Raymond Carver that Robert Altman transposed from the Pacific northwest to Los Angeles and skilfully dovetailed into Short Cuts.

Released in 1993, Short Cuts is, I think, Altman's greatest achievement. The lives of 20-odd characters of different professions and social backgrounds interact over a couple of days in a funny, sad, truthful film that captures the mysterious art of Carver's poetic realism. It's a big picture, much larger than the sum of its mosaic parts, unlike this week's most watchable film, the miniature, gem-like Everything Must Go, the feature debut of writer-director Dan Rush, which is based on a five-page story, "Why Don't You Dance?", which appeared in Carver's 1981 collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.

Carver's pared down, deceptively simple text has an unnamed middle-aged man sitting in his front garden at night, surrounded by his possessions arranged for a yard sale, all the electrical appliances hooked up to power lines. A young couple, his only customers, arrive, drink whisky with him and buy a few things. The young man gets slightly drunk, his partner dances with both men to an old record player, then in a coda set a few weeks later the girl tells some friends about the meeting, laughing about it yet somehow trying to puzzle out its meaning.

As with the girl, the story sticks in the reader's mind. We wonder who these people are, how they got there, where they're going, as if we ourselves had experienced the encounter. This is the way Dan Rush seems to have worked on "Why Don't We Dance?", and in exploring it he has come up with his interpretation, a narrative about Nick Halsey, an alcoholic salesman in Scottsdale, Arizona, who is fired when he goes back on the booze after a couple of years on the wagon.

After clearing his desk he sticks his Swiss army knife in a tyre of the firm's personnel director's car and returns home to find his wife has left, changing the locks and leaving his possessions in the front yard. He settles down on the sofa, surrounded by the bric-a-brac of his life, gets soaked when the sprinkler comes on, has a row with the cops, sees his car repossessed and his credit cards cancelled, and appears to be settling down to a new life of noisy desperation.

We initially believe that this is a black comedy for our present depressed time, the bitter flipside of Up in the Air, and this seems to be confirmed by the casting of star comedian Will Ferrell as Nick. The film is certainly not without humour. But Ferrell played it fairly straight in Woody Allen's Melinda and Melinda and Marc Forster's Stranger Than Fiction and here his baffled, bitter alcoholic is as impressive and as tinged with tragedy as that of another fine comedian, Jack Lemmon in Days of Wine and Roses. And naturally we recall Lemmon's last major screen role in Altman's Short Cuts.

The director has created several new characters who help him open up Nick's world. The first is his ambiguous friend and Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor, a local police lieutenant (Michael Peña), who gives him five days' grace to live on the lawn and conduct a sale of his worldly goods. The second is a young black school kid (the excellent Christopher Jordan Wallace) who becomes Nick's assistant and blossoms as his pupil (Nick is not just a salesman, he teaches the craft of salesmanship). The third is a new neighbour (Rebecca Hall), whose troubled life with her absent husband can be read by Nick as if it were a casebook. As Nick disposes of his possessions he gains a new, undemonstrative purchase on his life without undergoing any radical transformation other than the realisation that it's difficult, probably impossible, for two alcoholics to reform together. We recall that Carver's marriage broke up and he stopped drinking before embarking on a successful new life with fellow writer Tess Gallagher. I found this a delicately observed, satisfying movie and greatly enjoyed it. Others, of course, may prefer their own interpretation of Carver's tale.